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The definition of classroom participation is elusive and contested. There is a common tendency among instructors to relate classroom participation to verbal engagement: asking and answering questions, and participating in group discussions and debates (Straker, 2016). However, silent but attentive listening could also be recognised as a form of participation for students who are mentally engaged (Thom, 2010; Trahar, 2010). Carroll (2015) defines participation as active engagement and argues that both silent thinking and speaking constitute participation, but in different forms (thinking as cognitive participation and speaking as verbal participation). Pedagogy plays an important role in conceptualising classroom participation and in the interpretation of voice and silence. Different pedagogical beliefs require and expect different levels of student participation and may even cause a gap in expectations between international students and academic staff. In Western classrooms, participative and facilitative teaching approaches are supposed to be superior to teacher- centred and knowledge transmission approaches. Verbal participation and interaction is thus equated with learning and critical thinking (Turner, 2013). However, the dominance of participative learning or learner-centred education has been criticised as a Western pedagogy unsuitable for some cultural contexts and as a way of imposing instructors’ own values and beliefs on the classroom (C. J. Elliott & Reynolds, 2014; Schweisfurth & Elliott, 2019). The value and aims of the dominance of speech within Western classrooms represent its cultural construct, “giving primacy to the role of vocal communication in teaching and learning process”, a view which “exists relatively unchallenged” (Ollin, 2008, p. 266). Influenced by Vygotsky’s (1962) emphasis on the significant role of social interaction in the development of cognitive ability, group work and interactive

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activities are widely applied to get students to talk to each other. However, “social learning theory has been confused with ‘sociable’ learning theory” (Ollin, 2008, p.278) in that social interaction is often equated with verbal engagement, while Vygotsky also highlighted the internalisation of cognitive development from “vocalised cognitive processes to silent inner speech” (p.267).

The benefits of verbal participation are widely recognised and usually linked with engagement, critical thinking abilities and knowledge generation. For example, Weaver and Qi (2005) argue that students who actively speak up in class learn more than those who do not because they recognise the significant role of classroom participation in promoting critical thinking abilities and in fostering knowledge creation. Similarly, Auster and MacRone (1994) equate the quality of participation to its quantity as they assume that if a student asks or answers more questions, they try out more new ideas. They believe that verbal participation has a long-term influence on students’ intellectual and personal growth because verbal participation improves their communicative competence.

However, verbal participation does not always arise from critical thinking processes or careful consideration. Some researchers are critical of the quality of speech and question its contribution to the classroom. Kumpulainen and Wray (2003) agree that student participation provides students with more opportunities to question, reflect on and practice ways of knowing and thinking. However, they argue that the interactive classroom mode does not guarantee meaningful learning experience and that special attention should be paid to the patterns and content of students’ interactions in scaffolding or challenging their thinking. There is a significant difference between ‘speech’ and ‘verbal engagement’, as ‘speech’ describes physical sound, which can be random, while ‘verbal engagement’ requires active thinking and processing efforts. Ollin (2008) makes a distinction between vocalisation and verbalisation and he argues that there is no direct link between vocalisation and learning. Classroom activities involve a broader sense of

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verbalisation, including silent interaction with materials and thinking time, whereas vocalisation refers to immediate voiced responses. Silence can be used as slowing down time, allowing students to absorb the information and to promote further interactions between students and teachers (Li, 2004).

In addition, silence, as a classroom participation pattern, is in different forms resulting from different reasons. Echoing Fivush’s categories of silence as ‘being silent’ and ‘being silenced’ from a sociological perspective as discussed above, Kurzon (1997) distinguished different linguistic models of silence as ‘intentional silence’ and ‘unintentional silence’ from psychological perspective. Intentional silence is usually a deliberate strategy to cope with a certain situation, while unintentional silence describes unwilling silence, which often comes with frustration and embarrassment. Synthesising Fivush’s notions of ‘being silent’ and ‘being silenced’ with Kurzon’s concepts of intentional and unintentional silence, this study expands them into a new category as “proactive silence” and “reluctant silence” to better reflect students’ active choice, agency and power in the negotiating process. Although all categorisations refer to the same phenomena and ‘intentional’ also describes students’ proactive role in choosing to be silent, unintentional silence cannot describe the reluctance in the situation when students are relegated to a marginalised position in class. Students who represent proactive silence choose to keep quiet in class take silence as acceptable and normal behaviour. In contrast, students who engage in reluctant silence are simply unable to speak up, which usually comes with anxiety or frustration.

The silence discussed in existing studies about international students’ classroom participation is normally about the ‘reluctant silence’. However, there is limited discussion or recognition of the benefits of ‘proactive silence’. Silence has pedagogical benefits that are often neglected in the teaching and learning process. Beyond its instrumental value, silence has more intrinsic pedagogical merits, allowing for reflections and the reinforcement of knowledge. Cropley (2001)

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suggests that rather than overt verbal communication with others, students can engage in silent interaction with resources such as written texts or digital devices.

In summary, different pedagogies inform different classroom interaction patterns and different beliefs about the roles of verbal participation in the process of learning. The definition of classroom participation is contested considering the different aims of different classes. Although the benefits of verbal participation are widely recognised, its value and quality are difficult to measure. Both voice and silence have an important role to play in the classroom participation process. Essential to an understanding of culture, and critical to this study, is the fact that the lived classroom experience of international students cannot be fully explained by cultural or pedagogical theories. Instead, it is more context specific. The next section presents the conceptual framework of this study by examining classroom as community.